Uppark is a pleasing dolls’ house of a country house, as neat as an iced cake, set high on the West Sussex Downs with views, on a clear day, over the Solent to the Isle of Wight beyond. On a grey day the wind buffets the symmetrical, pink-brick Georgian facade and the immense, open prospect south seems bleak and forbidding. Behind are softer, gently enclosing beech woods, bluebells in May and herds of fallow deer. It is a place apart: an enclosed world with no other dwelling visible from its ninety-five windows.
Inside are all the spoils of several Georgian grand tours: two generations of voracious Fetherstonhaugh collecting. There are Canalettos, Batonis and Giordanos; there are chinoiserie lacquered cabinets, Dutch still lives, ormolu horses, Flemish tapestries, rococo giltwood mirrors, blue Sèvres vases and an immense quantity of Waterford chandeliers. There is a Saloon the size of half a tennis court, a Red Drawing Room, a Little Drawing Room and Little Parlour–‘little’ being a relative term.
Tea, in the Victorian era, was served by the butler from an urn on a finely worked silver salver. There were grape scissors and asparagus tongs on the dining-room table and Dresden washbasins painted with Meissen jonquils and roses in the bedrooms.
Presiding over all this in the year 1874 was Mary Ann’s younger sister–the living embodiment of High Victorian paranoia about class and transgression. The 1871 census has her down as Fanny Bullock, a name redolent of the farmyard, but three years later she is Frances Fetherstonhaugh. When Mary Ann died that year, aged 69, her will was very precise. Her sister Frances was to inherit her name, her coat of arms and the big house. And so this 55-year-old spinster vaulted all the rungs of the social ladder in one single, audacious leap.
But running a big house on a fairly frugal inheritance was a trial. Frances and her faithful older companion Ann Sutherland (rightful inheritor of the house, some thought, but anyway, permanently installed at Uppark and now aged 69) were not naturally authoritative with the servants. These first few years were thought to be something of a golden age in which to work below stairs at Uppark, because, so they said, you could get away with anything. The ladies muddled through. It was rumoured that they called the two footmen, who wore long-stemmed hothouse flowers in their lapels, ‘Hedward’ and ‘’Enry’ (no matter what their real names were) to save confusion. Servant turnover was high. The new Miss Fetherstonhaugh took to using Sir Harry’s Queen Anne silver christening bowl as a washbasin in her bedroom; tongues started wagging in the basement and beyond. As with her sister, Frances was still snubbed by much of society.
She had lived an uncommonly insular life for a country-house inheritor. There had been few suitors for her or for Ann Sutherland. No breath of change had penetrated Uppark, which remained apparently frozen in the eighteenth century. There was no gaslighting, no flushing sanitary closets or hot-water pipes. Visitors noted the quaint lack of contemporary taste: there were no aspidistras, no antimacassars, none of the obligatory three cushions per chair thought so essential to the High Victorian aesthetic (by this time all padding and plumpness, drapery and ornament). Unkind gossips laughed at these unworldly ladies conspiring to keep the house as it had always been–to ‘’ave everything as Sir ’Arry ’ad it’. (The two did not, as it happened, talk like this, but it was such fun for County wags to imagine that they did.)
Intimidating masculine decor loomed down at the ladies from every wall–antlered skulls, portraits of horses, still lives full of dead deer, lobsters, slaughtered boar and limp partridges. Above the Red Drawing Room fireplace hung a large oil painting of Sir Harry in his vigorous, curious youth, a dog at his side. A portrait of George III dominated the grand Saloon. Frances and Ann holed up in the Little Parlour, a calm, sunny, double-aspect room with a rare quality of cosiness. They were literally cornered–in a house too big, too grand and a touch anonymous. The ladies sat in gilt armchairs with their backs against the wall, on an uneasy footing with all around them.
In another life, Fanny Bullock might have become housekeeper of Uppark, had she gone into service like her sister. Now, six years into her tenure, she decided she needed one herself, as a marker of the social pretensions of the household. Miss Fetherstonhaugh, as she was now called, wanted to be treated with due respect as lady of the manor both by outsiders and insiders. She needed a go-between, a confidante; a cushion between her and the world. She longed, too, to be free of the bother of dealing with servants.
In her choice of housekeeper, Frances Fetherstonhaugh gave away both her ignorance and her insecurities. Rather than appoint an efficient professional with excellent references from another big house–a woman who might make her feel socially uneasy, threatened or displaced–she decided instead to give the job to someone from her past. Someone who would protect her. The new housekeeper’s name was Sarah Wells, and she was born an innkeeper’s daughter in Midhurst, seven miles away.